End political donations

a simple change to fix our broken system

Photo by Júnior Ferreira on Unsplash

I first had the thought a few weeks ago, while taking in aggressively negative political ads in between TV coverage of the destruction in North Carolina from Hurricane Helene.  Years ago, when I was selected for an annual corporate recognition trip (mostly for sales people) and the 2008 crash happened, the trip was canceled and recipients received a cash reward instead.  Leaderships’ perspective being that a tropical boondoggle would be tone deaf and ill-received while client assets had suffered steep declines.  Huh.  On one hand we have an underfunded recovery effort and the other, voters barraged with toxic ads, unlikely to change their minds anyway.  Why not donate ad money to Hurricane Helene rebuild efforts in exchange for positive PR from doing so?  Win win opportunity missed.

I have to give a shout out to

Visceral Adventure

, whose piece this morning on our current political state got me amped up enough to spark this inspiration: why not simply ban political donations and advertising?  Yes, completely.

We are suffering under a broken system, in which corporations’ influence is out of balance with consumers.  Take higher education, for example.  It’s just as good and less expensive to attend university in Europe, even paying elevated foreign student rates.  What’s more, while the US application system is fraught with anxiety, competition, and uncertainty due to students applying to dozens of schools, the UK has one application, capped at 5 schools, for one low fee.  Students have more control and certainty over where they will get in, the process is simpler, cheaper and less stressful.  We could do this in the US.. but colleges would miss out on all the hype, marketing and application fees.  The US system is biased in favor of colleges, not students.

Which got me thinking.. it’s clear we have a strong bias toward corporate interests in our current system, and it does not take a multi-variate analysis to figure out why.  Corporations (and ultra- wealthy individuals who own corporations) donate to politicians, who are obligated to represent their interests.  Spoiler:  their interests get represented.  End result, corporate takeover of regulators and a system that makes life difficult for all but those gainfully employed at senior levels of corporations and other well-funded institutions.

What’s amazing is that this terrible imbalance needs but one policy change to fix it:  ban political donations and political advertising.  We don’t need it.  How does it make sense for voters to be swayed by advertising that is incomplete, pointed and ultimately propaganda?  There is plenty of information available to inform decisions.  Candidates can continue to have websites, Twitter pages or whatever.  But outbound advertising and donations - hard no.  Independent podcasters, TV hosts can continue to express their opinions, as long as it’s illegal for candidates or anyone else to pay to influence them.  Most of all, track records can speak for themselves, as can debates - which need to be a mandatory requirement before elections (with fair mediation, which needs improvement from the gleefully hostile hostesses of the last debate).  Sorry, corporations - it will not be legal to pay or coerce your employees into voting a certain way.  There might hafta be some frustration and pain on the corporate side while we get things back into balance. You still have your lobbyists..

Boom!  There is the fix.  Now all we need to do is push the heck out of it, bringing a groundswell of consumer voices to pressure candidates into voting for it.

Let’s gooooooooooooooo!